Fictionwise.com Justifies Inaccessible eReader by Raising Copyright Concerns
— ♣Gregory Kearney, Manager of Accessible Media at the Association for the Blind of Western Australia, contacted Fictionwise.com, the company which develops many popular e-book readers, including eReader for the Mac and iPhone, regarding the distinct lack of VoiceOver access in both versions of eReader. Below is their response:
Hi,
Unfortunately, the ability to scoop the ebook’s text using another application has been disabled for copyright-protection reasons.
Being able to scoop the text out, into another program, would allow for easy duplication of copyrighted materials.
Our software cannot be used with screen-reader software.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Best Regards,
Ted
eReader.com Support Team
Apart from anything else, it can be strongly argued that VoiceOver is an integral part of both OS X and he iPhone OS, and therefore does not fall into the "other program" category. Prohibiting VoiceOver’s access to the software could be compared to blocking the eReader application from displaying books on any third-party monitors connected via a display port.
Even if we assume that providing accessibility into the application could somehow lead to greater piracy of electronic texts, there are other alternatives, even if they may be less than optimal for the end user. These include, but are not limited to, providing built-in text-to-speech capability into the application, as Amazon’s Kindle 2 and many software applications have done. Unfortunately, such a solution is opposed by the Author’s Guild, on the erroneous notion that allowing TTS on e-book devices would compare with a human performance of an audio book.
However, in the end, this response from Fictionwise.com appears to illustrate the company’s sketchy understanding of VoiceOver and accessibility, as well as being an admission that the company is deliberately blocking access to VoiceOver users.
We encourage our readers to contact Fictionwise.com at <support@fictionwise.com> and voice your opinion on this issue.